Rutland High School golf coach Rich Alberti was one of the speakers during a celebration of life service Saturday at the Rutland Country Club. Ferro, pictured on right, was a very talented golfer. Rev. Erica Baron of Rutland's Universalist Unitarian Church is also pictured.

Stories about Carly Ferro keep coming back to her smile and her laugh.More than 200 people packed into a room at the Rutland Country Club for Ferro’s memorial service Saturday. The 17-year-old Rutland High School senior was killed Wednesday in a car crash on Cleveland Avenue in Rutland; a local man faces criminal charges, including manslaughter, in her death.The service included two musical performances — a Shostakovich piece Ferro had been working on with the RHS advanced orchestra and a slightly altered version of “I Love You This Big” by Scotty McCreery, who Ferro had gone to see at the Vermont State Fair.Two collections of photos greeted family and friends as they arrived, one showing Ferro as a baby and another set of more recent pictures assembled by the RHS Key Club, of which she was a member.Ferro was also an avid golfer, and her bag and clubs sat in the front of the room, propped up beneath a large portrait.“I know, when you close your eyes and you remember Carly, what you’re going to remember is her smile and her laugh and that giggle — oh, Lord, that giggle,” Ferro’s aunt, Agnes Ferro, said. “It was infectious.”Michael Carmolli, one of Ferro’s teachers, also called her laugh “infectious.” He remembered coming across Ferro and two of her friends in the school lobby, laughing so hard they could barely stand.“I had no idea what they were laughing about, but I couldn’t help but start laughing myself,” he said. “She would giggle and she would cackle and she would howl and she would snort every once in a while, and it was wonderful.”Carmolli recalled an older girl admonishing Ferro to quiet down, telling her, “your laugh is so weird.”“She just said ‘yup’ and kept on laughing,” he said.One friend talked of Ferro’s smile welcoming her when she was new to the school. Another described the smile roping him into helping decorate for a dance, then attending the dance, then actually dancing at the dance.Other people talked about how competitive Ferro was from an early age, what a hard worker she was and how she wholeheartedly threw herself into community service projects.The Rev. Erica Baron of the Unitarian Universalist Church talked about how difficult Ferro’s death was, given her kindness and the senseless way she was killed.“We know it is not the natural order of things and we know there is nothing I can say to make it better,” she said.However, Baron said every act of kindness reverberates, and Ferro’s life will continue to have a positive effect on those who knew her, and they will, in turn, have a positive effect on others.